‘Inspector, you ask too many questions. I’m an old woman.’
‘Then I’ll ask it again.’
She shrugged in reproof. ‘The Mademoiselle Thélème first came to us almost as soon as we had moved in. The child was about a year old.’
‘In 1931, then.’
‘Yes, but her “Jani” did not come with her until the summer of 1934.’
‘And did she use the name of Thélème at that time?’ persisted Louis.
The slicing stopped. Tears began to form. ‘Inspector, have I been wrong to entrust Sylvianne to her?’
‘No. No, of course not. Please, you mustn’t worry. The girl will soon return.’
‘Then why did you ask that about Nana? What else would she have called herself?’
It would do no good to avoid the issue, but Nana had obviously come gradually to understand who the child’s real father was. ‘We only thought it might be a stage name, as is the Mademoiselle Arcuri’s, whose real name is Natal’ya Kulakov-Myshkin.’
‘A Russian!’
‘But widowed. Her married name is Thériault.’
Louis was just digging a hole for himself. ‘When did they arrive to take the girl?’ asked Kohler.
Her look was cold, but she knew she’d have to answer. ‘A week ago yesterday. They came, they said, only to deliver the suitcase but when she learned of Madame’s death, Mademoiselle Thélème agreed to take Sylvianne with her even though they would have to seek residence and travel papers for her. The Mademoiselle Arcuri was convinced she could take care of the matter and that there would be no problem. “The Kommandant von Gross Paris is an old friend,” she said. “He’ll understand the need and that there is nothing untoward in our request.”’
Old Shatter Hand wasn’t going to like it when he learned the truth, thought Kohler but said pleasantly enough, ‘They went to a quarry.’
‘Yes. Monsieur Jacqmain had told Mademoiselle Thélème of the pierre fine from which the Château de Versailles was constructed. This limestone came from quarries nearby.’
Building at Versailles had begun in 1624, recalled St-Cyr. Louis XIII had wanted a small hunting pavilion, but it was the Sun King, Louis XIV, who, from 1661 to 1681, had built on an impressively grand scale and in 1682 had made Versailles the official residence and seat of government.
‘Monsieur Jacqmain did come to Senlis occasionally, Inspectors, but never to this house. It was his intention to reopen one of the old quarries but not for cut stone, you understand. For road metal. He invested substantially but was thwarted. No one wanted the noise of the blasting. Several were afraid the vibrations would disturb their livestock, even the honeybees in the orchards. There is also a small and very old chapel near the quarry. A beautiful little church the workers used to be blessed in each day before work began. The resident father was most concerned about the ancient stained glass which is said to be some of the finest in …’
‘Yes, yes,’ said St-Cyr, ‘but when, please, did Monsieur Jacqmain invest in the project?’
‘During the rainy season in Africa he would return to France. It was in 1936 but if you ask me, Inspector, I believe, as did Madame, that his sole object was to find an excuse to be close to his daughter. We … we could not let that happen and … and lent our voices to those of the others. Since then, we have not seen him.’
De Vries could not have known then, in 1934, of the explosives and could only have learned of them much later. ‘And those two Parisiennes wanted to see an ancient quarry just so that they could tell others they’d been there?’ asked Kohler.
Was the Bavarian a disbeliever of everything? ‘Nana said Monsieur Jacqmain had given her something that had to be returned to the magazine. He was most insistent.’
‘The nitroglycerine in the suitcase,’ interjected St-Cyr.
‘Yes. A flask that was kept in its special box. He had taken it away just before the war stopped him from going back to his savages. You see, I have the keys to the gates and to the magazines. The quarry is just to the east of Aumont-en-Halatte, in the escarpment, but the roads … this weather … the darkness. They went in daylight. Surely you’re not …’
‘No problem,’ said Kohler. ‘All we need are the keys. We’ll see that they’re returned with Sylvianne.’
When they reached the car and were letting its engine warm, Kohler said, ‘The kid’s the Gypsy’s, Louis, and Nana soon figured it out.’
‘But was Tshaya aware of Nana’s continued interest in the child or of Jacqmain’s interest in Nana?’
‘She must have been. When faced with deportation in 1941, she fled to Tours to be close to the one man she knew would help her because she had what he wanted, the scars, and his mother had what was hers. Is she the reason Nana bought the flypapers?’
‘Strychnine is most unpleasant, Hermann. The body convulses. The face grows livid, the eyes bulge until death intervenes, then …’
‘Ja, ja, mein lieber Detektiv, just answer the question, eh?’
Kohler got out to rip the black-out tape from the headlamps. ‘It’s an emergency,’ he said. ‘Gabrielle and Nana and Suzanne-Cécilia each must know it’s only a matter of time until they’re picked up, if they haven’t already been.’
Louis sighed heavily. ‘Then perhaps that is why Nana wanted the strychnine and it is only a matter of time until they take it.’
*
The forest was close, the road winding. Ahead of them the garde champêtre of Aumont-en-Halatte pushed his sturdy bicycle, cursing the snow, the lateness of the hour and themselves most especially.
Beyond a wooden bridge across a frozen stream, tall and rusting gates bore a last vestige of the Sun King’s coat of arms and the faded notice Défense d’entrer.
‘I will wait here, Inspectors,’ grumbled the village cop. ‘That way, if there is trouble, some warning may be given.’
A wise man, was that it? wondered Kohler, squinting down through the driving snow at this father of seven children, all of whom had been under the age of five. ‘You do that, Henri, but make sure the tombstones are of granite, eh? and not of limestone. It lasts a hell of a lot longer.’
The bushy eyebrows knitted themselves, the grizzled moon-cheeks tightened. Paris would have to be told how things were. Paris must be forced to listen! ‘Inspector, no one has been here for years. The magazines are isolated – ah! certainement, Monsieur Jacqmain has obeyed all the regulations to the letter. Distance from the working face. Protection in case of accident. Two timbered walls with sand packed between in case some idiot with a rifle should have target practice. A double roof aussi, and sufficient ventilation. But …’ He paused. He gave these two time to reconsider their little adventure. ‘But the dynamite should have been taken away long ago. It smells. The heat in summer has not been good for it, the dampness in springtime also.’
‘Anything else?’ asked the giant, grinning down at him from under a beaver hat with full earflaps that were tied beneath the chin.
‘Oui. Many times I have notified the authorities in your army to send a disposal crew but without success.’
‘We only want to have a look.’
The chubby lips were pursed in exasperation. ‘That is what I am afraid of.’
A wise man again.
‘Inspectors, there are two magazines and they are well off to your left some 600 metres once you enter the property. They are behind a remnant of the original escarpment, a boss of rock that was not mined out. First comes the powder magazine and then, some fifty paces further, that of the blasting caps.’
Companionably Kohler clapped a hand on his shoulder. ‘Give us a fag, eh? For the war effort. Hey, make it two.’
‘Hermann, if he has any, they will have to be hand rolled. It will take all night in this wind!’
Woefully the dark brown eyes caught the light from the headlamps. ‘I have none,’ lamented the village flic. ‘Now even the tobacco ration has been cut in half, nor can I take one stick of wood from the forest to warm the toes.’
‘Inspectors, please watch your step. With the snow, the crevasses in the floor will be hidden. Those, that is, which do not have the cedars sprouting from them.’
The big one switched off the headlamps and the engine and pocketed the keys only to take them out to lock all doors. ‘Our guns,’ he said. ‘I’m the one who’s responsible for them. They’re under the driver’s seat, so keep an eye on the car.’
‘Thieves in this weather?’ came the startled retort but by then the two were negotiating the gates, and soon, even the light of their torches had been swallowed up.
Isolated the quarry was, and huge. Though they would see little, would they not perhaps feel the size of it? he wondered. The utter emptiness? Versailles was a palace but there had been other and more recent demands. As a result, a lot of stone had been removed, the face of the escarpment having been eaten away until it was now indented nearly one kilometre.
Far from flat, the floor was often stepped. There were ledges. There were still places where, in summer one could see the lines of holes, each hole two metres from all others in the line and perhaps thirty centimetres deep. These holes had been drilled by hand using hardened iron chisels and wooden mallets. The lines followed the grain of the rock so that it could be ‘feathered’ out by pounding hardwood pegs into the holes. The rock was then split along the lines of pegs and along the bedding surface below, a time-honoured method but one which had left the debris of some carelessness for those who would venture in at night, and in winter, to stumble over.
When the beams of their torches found the powder magazine, it stared out of the blizzard at them from under a sloping roof whose tar paper was buffeted by the wind.
The door was solid, the padlock big and tight. And the bare, unpainted boards were weathered beneath the alarmingly bullet-riddled signboard of Explosifs. Danger, Défense d’entrer.
‘That sand in the walls must be full of lead, Louis.’
‘Gabrielle and Nana came here, Hermann. How could they have done such a thing?’
They had come on the thirteenth, in preparation for the Gypsy’s arrival. ‘They even thought to oil the lock. Look, it’s still sticky.’
The powerful stench of bitter almonds came to them. Hermann gagged and tossed his head. Hesitating, he stared at the lock in alarm, then at the key in his hand. He tried to cram his torch under an arm and get it to shine fully on the damned thing. ‘Here, Louis. You hold it.’
The key went in. He bit his lower lip. He said, ‘Is it really oil, or has that son of a bitch beaten us here and left us another surprise?’
Leaving the key in the lock, Hermann began to search for footprints other than their own, but it was no use. ‘They couldn’t have had an oil can with them, could they?’ he bleated in despair, only to add, ‘Beat it, eh? Go on. Take cover.’
St-Cyr reached out and, saying, ‘We’re in this together,’ turned the key and removed the lock.
The door opened easily enough but not before Hermann had gone over and around it carefully. Light shone feebly in on wooden cases, each of which carried embossed words of Dynamite, 25 kilos. Fifty per cent, 110 sticks.
Each stick would be twenty centimetres in length by two and a half in diameter, and there were plenty enough of them lying in recently opened cases for one to see that the years and the heat and the humidity had been most unkind.
There were slats of wood under the tiers of cases, and straw beneath these and around them, and this straw had received the seepage.
‘Louis …’
‘Hermann …’
Both were speechless. It was eerie, it was terrible. Gabrielle and Nana Thélème and perhaps the Gypsy too, but later … later, had used a screwdriver to open the cases. They had actually taken handfuls of sticks, had braved the fumes, the dizziness and had been oblivious to the danger.
‘Hermann …’
‘Well, what is it?’
‘Flasks of nitroglycerine, but the case is empty.’
Oh-oh. ‘How many?’
‘A dozen. Each of one hundred cubic centimetres.’
They stared at the flat case whose square compartments were cushioned with rubber and had each held its little wooden box. They tried to comprehend how those two women could possibly have transported such things to Paris without accident. They worried about Janwillem De Vries.
‘The house on the rue Poliveau,’ blurted Hermann. ‘He needed nitro then.’
‘But is it that he now has more than enough or is it that they held back on him and gave him only the first flask and not the others?’
Had he been here since, or had only Gabrielle and Nana paid a visit?
Braving the fumes, weeping, gagging constantly, they searched as best they could. Perhaps the freezing temperatures helped to hold off an explosion, perhaps God simply looked down on them and took pity.
The magazine was not large by such standards, and when he found a woman’s handkerchief, St-Cyr knew that one of them must have dropped it by accident.
Coughing, choking, they went outside for air. Both were bent double. The fumes burned.
Weeping, they huddled over the handkerchief. ‘How many cases are gone in addition to the nitroglycerine?’ managed St-Cyr.
‘Two, I think, and … and some coils of safety fuse.’
The magazine for the detonators was much smaller and was free of fumes. Here there was shelving but broken-open cardboard packets revealed blasting caps so corroded, their copper tubes, each of pencil-size in diameter and no more than three and a half centimetres in length, were encrusted with verdigris. The ones that were used with safety fuse were often stuck together. The ones that were used for electrical blasting had two thin wires protruding from the base of each cap, and often these wires were corroded at their ends.
It was clear that Gabrielle and Nana Thélème had searched for the best of them, clear also that they had taken sufficient.
But had the Gypsy been here since to help himself?
At 5 a.m. those who started for work in Paris did not lift their heads. The iron-hard frost of the Occupation’s most hungry winter was crushing. They coughed, they wheezed painfully. Steps squeaked. The smoke from the firefly glows of occasional cigarettes did not rise, and everyone, it seemed, had the flu.
Remi Rivard let the last of the Wehrmacht’s soldier boys out of the Club Mirage and began to bolt the doors.
‘A moment, Remi,’ hazarded a frozen voice in pitch darkness. ‘Are things clear?’
Of the Gestapo? ‘Perhaps.’
The Corsicans, the club’s owners, were ever-wary. ‘Where is Gabrielle? Her car …’
‘It was stolen. She has had to file a procès-verbal and is not here. Some idiots in the Resistance took it.’
‘Pardon?’
‘You don’t listen, do you? The Gypsy, you idiot. The Resistance! Now ask that frozen gumshoe brain of yours what was in her car.’
‘Explosives.’
‘You said it. I didn’t.’
7
From the quai de Tournelle, at first light, the spires of the Church of Saint-Gervais-et-Saint-Protais were hardly visible, and the jumble of rooftops St-Cyr loved so much was a leaden, bluish-grey through which the faded green of copper sheathing made a tracery among the slate and tile.
Hermann and he had been through a lot since September 1940, but this … this was not even a nothing murder in which they had had to cross the SS. It was a catastrophe and no amount of fitting the pieces together could solve the thing because they had been pitted against friend and loved one and she had not confided in them.
Gabrielle had driven the Gypsy to the quarry on the very morning of the day they had gone there but had had no need of the keys. They had not even noticed the tyre marks of her car!
He thought back to that nothing murder in the first week of December last. He recalled how, at its conclusion, she had sought him out and had found him staring at the Loire as he was now staring at the Seine. He had just learned of th
e deaths of Marianne and Philippe. She had offered solicitude and comfort, a room in her flat, since the front of his house had been destroyed. She had wanted to get to know him better and had taken that supreme step of putting her life in his hands by confiding she would join the Resistance, but must already have been in the réseau and even then had hidden it from him. Ah nom de Dieu, what were they to do?
She had given a signed statement to the police.
The Seine seemed not to care about his or anyone else’s troubles. When Kohler found him not in the nearby cafe as agreed but staring bleakly at the river, he steeled himself and, putting an arm about Louis’s shoulders, said, ‘They’re holding her in a cell at the rue des Saussaies. Boemelburg is saying that since she’s the only one who has had recent contact with De Vries, her life is in danger.’
That was simply Gestapo jargon for polite arrest. Sonderbe-handlung. ‘And the other two?’ asked St-Cyr, not looking up from the river.
‘Now under constant surveillance in hopes they’ll lead them to him.’
‘But … but they’d have been under surveillance anyway?’
‘Not entirely. Not by far. Some idiot got slack, but now it’s round the clock.’
Fortunately Hermann still had his inside sources at Gestapo Paris-Central, but must have paid dearly for the information. And what price exactly had he paid? His undying loyalty? His renewed oath of allegiance to those monsters? ‘What of Tshaya?’
‘No one knows. She’s probably with De Vries. Everyone’s asking what they’ll do next, where they’re hiding, and who’s helping them.’
‘And Gabrielle’s car, what of it?’
‘The Wehrmacht and the préfet’s boys are doing another sweep of the city. All courtyards, passages, garages et cetera. She gave them a detailed list of the explosives.’
‘Freely?’ demanded Louis, his eyes full of tears.
‘Freely. No torture. Not yet.’
‘And who did she say the résistants who stole it were? She must have described them. She did, didn’t she?’
‘Easy, eh? Easy, mon vieux. The car was stopped at a roadblock on their way out from the quarry. She was blindfolded. She had a pistol pointed at the back of her head. All six of them wore bandannas over their faces and carried rifles.’
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